Austal USA has 2,100 workers, 115 acres and up to $5.2 billion worth of U.S. Navy contracts at its Mobile River shipyard.

What it doesn’t have is a mailbox.

Austal and several other businesses on Pinto Island, across the river from downtown Mobile, don’t get mail delivery from the U.S. Postal Service. Company officials say time-sensitive documents from job applicants, subcontractors and even government officials get delayed and sometimes lost.

"It’s the era of the Pony Express out here on Pinto Island," said Craig Hooper, Austal’s vice president for sales, marketing and external communication.

That era may soon be ending. Shortly after being contacted by the Press-Register for comment, a post office spokeswoman said the service is considering delivery to the island.

Postal service spokeswoman Debbie Fetterly said Wednesday that Mobile’s postmaster has looked into mapping out a Pinto Island route, but nothing has been confirmed.

‘Apart from civilization’

Bill Harrison III’s family started Harrison Brothers Dry Dock and Repair Yard on Pinto in 1895, and mail delivery has never once been an option, he said.

Back then, the business had to ship its workers across Mobile River on a barge. The Cochrane Bridge opened the island to car traffic in 1928, followed by the Bankhead Tunnel in 1941 and the Wallace Tunnel in 1973, but still the mail stayed west of the water.

"We’re sort of apart from civilization," Harrison joked.

For much of the 20th century, the island was dominated by the Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding Co., which employed more than 30,000 workers at its peak, building and retrofitting Navy vessels during World War II.

Those days are long gone, but the island is still home to some of Mobile’s largest employers, such as Austal and BAE Systems Southeast Shipyards.

BAE has about 800 workers, and expects to add another 400 in the next few years as part of a recently signed agreement to build offshore oil vessels.

Austal employs more than 2,100, with plans to grow to nearly 4,000 workers to meet Navy contracts for littoral combat ships and high-speed transport vessels.

‘All sorts of things go awry’

Austal opened its shipyard in 2001, and has been lobbying for postal service since then, Hooper said.

The company has a post office box in Mobile and pays a courier to bring about two bins full of mail to the shipyard every day, he said.

But some people just look up the shipyard’s physical address and send mail there. That’s when the trouble starts, Hooper said.

"One of our VPs, when he was a job candidate, wrote a nice thank you note and had it returned," Hooper said.

Worse, he said, are the "business-critical, time-critical pieces of mail that go astray. Bids, pricing, government report requests — all sorts of things go awry."

Bill Pfister, another Austal executive, said many GPS systems base their directions on postal service information, which makes it tricky to get to Austal’s Dunlap Drive address.

"Since it is a guy-thing to not ask directions, quite a few prominent customers and suppliers ended up at Dunlap Circle in Prichard," he said.

Harrison said he’s been in post offices all over Mobile looking for packages that were never delivered.

"I’ve chased things down sometimes in Springhill, the Five Points post office, everywhere up and down the city," he said.

"We’re just used to it," he said. "Everybody copes with whatever the situation is."